Breaking News: Astronauts Drink Alcohol!!!

We are shocked - shocked! - to learn that NASA shuttle astronauts regularly consume adult beverages shortly prior to perching themselves upon large quantities of high explosives in order to be shot into low Earth orbit so they can perform their custodial duties on the flying shitcan often referred to as the International* Space Station. And instead of offering to pay for their bar tab, I suspect the bureaucrat desk-pilots at NASA, along with their stooge enablers in Congress, will find some way of punishing them. Gus Grissom is surely spinning in his grave.

Now, anyone who has read "The Right Stuff" will understand that alcohol and astronauts are so close together in the dictionary that their definitions might as well be combined, and that this tradition predates the space race, going back to the test pilots who strapped themselves into prototype aircraft often to return in body bags, "burnt beyond recognition" as Tom Wolfe would frequently remind us. This was a dangerous job and those who did it lived fast and partied hard; it was understood by everyone that girly-men need not apply. These men were once celebrated and idolized by society, and whole issues of Life Magazine were devoted to them; now they are called Neanderthals.

Part of the problem is due to the Pussification Of The Western Male, and of American Society itself. Astronauts aren't larger-than-life heroes anymore, manly men who risk their manly lives to push the outer boundaries of human exploration. No, they're janitors now (see Greg Klerxx, "Lost In Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age"); in fact, some of them are even psycho-bitches and (worse still) Canadians. I suspect this makes some people feel good about themselves, knowing that our astronauts are every bit as fucked up and culturally diverse as the rest of us. But in our pussified nanny-state, we can't allow astronauts to drink - drunk men are bad, they frequently chase women and make fun of effeminate men. I'll bet sometimes they smoke while they drink! It's even been rumored that, when not risking their lives in rocket ships, some astronauts have in the past resorted to driving sports cars. Fast. This must be stopped before someone is offended.

Personally, I don't even consider the latest batch of Shuttle passengers to be "astronauts" - that word should be reserved for pilots who have large, hairy balls and a willingness to put them on the line to do something meaningful, such as landing on Mars. I'll give due credit to the actual pilots who de-orbit and land the flying schoolbus, but the rest of them are little more than zero-G airline passengers. And we still serve airline passengers in-flight drinks, don't we?

Nevertheless, what they do is risky - whether they are pilots or passengers - and they deserve to be cut some slack. Frankly, I can't imagine anyone getting within a quarter-mile of the Shuttle launch pad while sober. But there will be no slack forthcoming. I predict the witch hunt will begin presently; politicians will fall over each other in the mad scramble to get in front of the cameras to denounce this abhorrent behavior, castigate the guilty parties for abdicating their role-model duty to our children (as if kids these days give a shit about space janitors), and somehow find a way to blame it all on George Bush.

In the end, some bureaucrats will get fired, some astronauts will be grounded, and new regulations will be devised to mandate a kinder, gentler astronaut corp. NASA may even undergo a complete reorganization with a new, idiotic mission and purpose for being: to stop global warming, perhaps; or maybe to do something more important, like developing technology needed to increase tampon absorbency in zero gravity.

And in a few years, we'll turn on the news to learn that the Chinese have launched a manned mission to Mars... after a long night of hard partying.

R.I.P. NASA.

* The International Space Station is "International" only in the sense that, while the American taxpayer foots most of the bill for it, other countries get to share in the credit. When things go right, that is; otherwise it's America's fault.

Update 8/3: Krauthammer concurs.

Labels: Commentary

posted by Paul @ 11:03 AM